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An Update to Deep Zoom Composer

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Ever since we released Deep Zoom Composer during MIX, there has been a ton of great feedback you have all sent us on what you liked and what you would like to see improved in future versions. To give you a sneak peek at where we are currently, we're releasing an updated version of Deep Zoom Composer for you all to play with:

dzcicon Download the Deep Zoom Composer

Before installing this version, please uninstall earlier versions of Deep Zoom Composer. All of your older projects should still work, so don't worry! Once you have it installed, besides a ton of changes under the hood to make creating your Deep Zoom content faster and more memory-efficient, some of the bigger features that you will immediately notice are the following:

Improved Exporting

The single biggest thing we heard consistently from all of you was to make exporting better. In the earlier version, all we did was just output the image tree. To figure out where you had to go from there, our Composer didn't help. Luckily, you had quality blog postings from individuals such as Scott Hanselman, Pete Blois, Wilfred Pinto, Jaime Rodriguez, and others who helped answer the question "Where to go from here?" In this version of Deep Zoom Composer, we try to make that easier for you by outputting a working Silverlight 2 project along with your image tiles:

exportDZC

Now, you no longer have to worry about what to do with these bizarre cutouts of images that you get as your output, and we even provide all of the mousewheel, pan, zoom, and keyboard functionality that you otherwise had to write yourself!

Better Design Experience

Arranging images can be a time-consuming task. To make it easier for you to do that, we've added snapping and guidelines that appear when you are dragging either a single or a group of images around:

imageSnapping

We also took care of the various filling/scaling issues you would have encountered when zooming in on images on the design surface. In case you didn't know, Deep Zoom Composer actually uses a variation of the tiling technology from Deep Zoom on the design surface itself, so we would be swapping images in an out at a frantic pace if you happened to be zooming and panning around while composing your images. We still do that....but it just feels more natural without the distortions you saw earlier.

Updated Collections Export

When exporting collections, Deep Zoom Composer would often misrepresent the position of your arrangements when you actually previewed in our browser. Thanks to the Live Labs team (Lutz, Dan, Avi, and Rado), they were able to pinpoint the problem and fix it for us in this release. You no longer have to worry about what you see in Deep Zoom Composer not being what you saw in the browser.

Greater Access to Help

There will be times when you would need more help than what the application provided. We've tried to call out both our support forum and this blog throughout the application so that you can quickly get unblocked on any issues you run into:

gettinghelp

In the past, all of these questions have been handled directly on the blog. For archival purposes, it would be great if you could post those questions on the forums instead. Scanning through several posts with 50+ blog comments for solutions probably isn't fun, and we don't want your question to get lost and go unanswered.

Where Next?

There are still a lot of great features that we will be adding in the future, so if you have any requests, complaints, wishes, etc., please feel free to let us know by posting a comment here or in our Deep Zoom forum on the Expression Forums.

Cheers!
Celso, Janete, Kirupa

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    Ever since we released Deep Zoom Composer during MIX, there has been a ton of great feedback you have

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    Ever since we released Deep Zoom Composer during MIX, there has been a ton of great feedback you have

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    URL : http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2008/0... The Expression team has released a new Beta

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    URL : http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2008/0... The Expression team has released a new Beta

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    Awesome, installing now. Thanks, John.

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    Microsoft just released an update to the Deep Zoom Composer that works with Silverlight 2 Beta 1. 

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    Elég sok gond volt a Silverlight DeepZoom Composer korábbi verziójával, főleg az

  • Anonymous
    May 04, 2008
    New and Improved - Deep Zoom Composer

  • Anonymous
    May 04, 2008
    Ici : https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=457b17b7-52bf-4bda-87a3-fa8a4673f8bf&displaylang=en

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    Deep Zoom Composer är verktyget för att skapa den typen av zoomningsbara Silverlight-bildkollektioner

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    Microsoft released an update to the Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 2 Beta 1. I'm excited to try

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    Helping to connect the dots a little easier when building a Silverlight Deep Zoom applications, the Expression

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    I was trying the new version of the Deep Zoom Composer …it’s just great!! Between all the

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    [SOURCE CODE + BINARY OF THE EXPORTER APPLICATION ATTACHED TO THE BOTTOM OF THE POST] The Deep Zoom composer

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    Maybe it is marketing. Maybe it is the fact that it looks like a photo editing tool.  But, some

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    it would seem to be useful for beginers :) thank you for work.

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    There's an update to the Deep Zoom Composer. Get it today! :) Expression Blend and Design : An Update

  • Anonymous
    May 06, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 07, 2008
    h2.entry-title {font-size: 1.1em; clear:left;} ul.hfeed {list-style-type: none;} li.xfolkentry {clear

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2008
    deef - we are working on that, and you can do that already with a lot of trickery using the SparseImageTool.exe found in the Deep Zoom Composer's Program Files folder. An example of what you suggest can be seen on a public preview site called PhotoZoom: http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com/ :)

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2008
    WPF Controls Emphess.Net: A MenuKiller Control - this article is a work in progress detailing how to

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2008
    Vi segnalo un importante aggiornamento dal blog di team di Expression Blend e Design , è disponibile

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2008
    The Deep Zoom composer is a great tool to manually design a composition. It is still in an early stage

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2008
    It still may be at an early stage, but I find software like this really exciting to use. The best thing about it is it took me under a minute to be able to browse the help file and have it opened in IE8, incredible. I love software that is so intuitive it shows that the programmers are highly involed in and enjoying thier work.

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2008
    Thanks for the nice comments Bill :-)

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2008
    Deep Zoom Composer 已经发布了一个更新的版本，最重要的改进是预置了 Silverlight 模板的支持， 你可以直接预览你的 Deep Zoom 应用，或者很方便的打包上传你的应用到

  • Anonymous
    May 19, 2008
    hello. is there a bug? when i add images into deep zoom composer,sometime it would exit without any info.

  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2008
    Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond just published a series of Silverlight 2 screencasts. You can access them

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2008
    copy-paste de um email bárbaro que recebi aqui: Silverlight To learn more about Silverlight visit

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2008
    Lang - could you share the image you are trying to load that is causing Deep Zoom Composer to exit without giving you any real info? You can e-mail me the link to the image to kirupac[at]microsoft.com Thanks, Kirupa

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2008
    A couple weeks ago, the Deep Zoom Composer Team announced an update to Deep Zoom Composer that was first

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2008
    My latest links about WPF (Apps, Controls, 3.5sp1 beta, HowTo, for LOB), Silverlight, XAML and URLs WPF

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2008
    There's an update to the Deep Zoom Composer. Get it today! :) Expression Blend and Design : An Update

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2009
    There's an update to the Deep Zoom Composer. Get it today! :) Expression Blend and Design : An Update

  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2009
    There's an update to the Deep Zoom Composer. Get it today! :) Expression Blend and Design : An Update